Friday, February 10, 2017

I’m my own restorer!

I’m working on paintings whose emulsion was damaged by being
stacked before they were completely dry. There isn’t much thinking involved,
since I did all that on site. I just mix the proper color, fill in scratches and
smears, and restore the original appearance.

A typical smear.

How did they get banged up in the first place? I had
wet-storage for about a dozen paintings. Generally, after that, work is dry
enough to be wrapped and binned with wax paper liners. It may have been the
constant cold, but for some reason, they weren’t setting up very fast. I was constantly
shuffling paintings to keep the wettest ones to the top.

No Northern Lights tonight, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In addition, the roads were jaw-breakingly bad in many places.
Part of our daily routine was to check the tailpipe and repack the back of the
truck. All that bouncing meant that some things were inevitably going to be
damaged.

Muncho Lake, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In only one of these paintings did I make a material change.
That was to add reflections on Muncho Lake. I knew they were there at
the time, and they were important for the composition. However, Mary was sick,
sleeping in a motel room at Toad River. I’d been gone all day and that was long
enough.

Avalanche Country, oil on canvas by Carol L. Douglas

I don’t have much need for reference pictures at this stage.
Since I didn’t take many, that’s a good thing. In comparing my trip photos with
my paintings, I notice how blue all my photos look, and how vague the
structures of the mountains are. It seems to me that my little pocket Panasonic
camera perceives atmospheric haze more than my aging eyes do.

Chugach range from Anchorage, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

My eyes, my camera, and my monitor are all subjective
observers, so none of them can be called objectively “true” at the expense of
the others. It’s just another caution about painting from photographs, and
another thing to ponder in regards to Truthiness.

I also started my second studio painting from the trip, of
the Athabasca Glacier. That
day, there was a ferocious, ripping wind. Even with an airtight hood, my
ears rang. My easel spun helplessly on its tripod. There was no way to paint on
site, so I settled for a hike and some photographs.

Underpainting of Athabasca Glacier, by Carol L. Douglas

This underpainting is not an abstraction, just a vast simplification.
It reminds me a little of Rockwell Kent. Having no real desire to go down that
road, I sigh and tell myself this is probably the high point of the painting.

Before anything more can happen in my studio, however, I
have a driveway to shovel out. The morning dawned clear, still and cold, as if denying
that it had ever stormed yesterday. “Liar!” I shout up at the sky, but to no
avail.

Shovel I must. I’m having lunch with a student visiting
from Tennessee. Later, a friend from Alabama is stopping by to teach me how to make
biscuits. Maine is an out-of-the-way place to be the Crossroads of America, but a lot
of the time it feels that way.